Performance Anxiety

The rather macabre public reaction has expressed two things. First, a profound shock at the shattering of a family through such an intimate and unimaginable tragedy. Second, culture-war quibbling over… Read more

Diane Keaton, the Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall, Father of the Bride, Something’s Gotta Give and other classic films, died last week on 11 October in California, at the age of 79. Keaton wasn’t merely… Read more

Robert Redford is dead. The actor passed away this week aged 89, at his home in Sundance, Utah. With his passing goes something rare in modern Hollywood: unironic, wholesome masculinity.… Read more

Terence Stamp, who died last week at the age of 87, was the essence of what the Sixties needed from a film star. Some actors are blessed with charm, others… Read more

David Lynch was a filmmaker like no other. The director behind Twin Peaks (1990-2017), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) was a true visionary, who turned the unsettling and… Read more

The new season of Wolf Hall on BBC One is the latest contribution to an ill-defined yet ever-present genre of TV and film we tend to think of as being… Read more

Zone of Interest is one of the best cinematic attempts there is to make tangible Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil. For Arendt, the evil of the Holocaust was not in… Read more

How much of an obligation do artists have to depict historical events accurately? The old question has come to the fore once again in response to Ridley Scott’s latest film,… Read more

The new, Disney live-action version of the Little Mermaid is, sad to say, disappointing and boring, as I’m sure the handful of restless, inattentive kids who were at the same… Read more

Kate Bush’s 1985 song, ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, is currently No1 in the UK singles charts – 37 years after it was first released. This is… Read more

Brian Cox, star of Succession, has become the latest actor to express concerns over today’s casting process. He claims that so-called authentic casting, in which roles go to actors with the same lived… Read more